The newly-elected President of Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (AAAN), Lanre Adisa, in this maiden chat with the media as the association’s helmsman, bares his mind on salient issues affecting Nigeria’s creative Advertising industry, and his plans at making a difference. Excerpts:
What will your administration be doing in terms of resuscitating dying or dead agencies?
Sadly this is the nature of business. Where we can help, we will help, especially for young agencies, too. For instance, are there forms of mentorship that we can bring in? Are there things that people with other experiences can share with you? Are there things that the secretariat can also work out and use to support such businesses? One of the things we did in the last administration is the setting up of the welfare committee, just to check on one another. Now can we extend that welfare also to businesses? In other words, how can we support you as a business? How can the secretariat be of help? Can it become a form of consultancy that can help businesses in some areas?So those are some of the areas we’ll be talking about.
What are your plans for the AdAcademy?
It has been on the table for a long time, but I think this last administration, made some considerable efforts to bring it to life. There was some form of partnership with a foreign business school for some time. It’s good but it needs to be homegrown. Let’s build it from here first, and now seek partnership to grind it more. Such foreign partnership is not even sustainable if you look at the exchange rate when you do business with any outfit outside Nígeria. If they say it’s $500, when you look at it, how many agencies can you send from your end? So there must be a way out. The talent is here. Our people are the ones going to Pan African University (PAU) to teach Advertising, when we can actually find a way of using them within our own environment. I’ll say watch that space in terms of changing the dynamics. I believe it’s a path to the future, in terms of training and retraining.
The other thing that can help us is encouraging guilds to happen. Guild of Writers, Guild of Directors and others, and have them work within themselves, set their own standards and fix all of that into LAIF Award, and you will be surprised at the results you are going to get.
Not a few believed AAAN needs to do more in terms of activities and engagements, how do you intend to address this?
Yes. I agree with you. And one of the things that I did, recently, was to look at equivalent associations, in other climes. Just looking at their websites shows that there is a whole lot that we can do and we’ll try to ensure we step up on our activities. We don’t have to do only big events. I believe people will take us seriously when we start having conversations around what we do as an industry.
Many believe the industry is gradually experiencing some dearth in trained personnel, a development that has given room to poaching. What are your plans concerning training of practitioners within the sector?
If you train, there will be less poaching. It is because there is shortage of talents, that we have poaching. Even when you send somebody abroad, some people will still leave, but it will not be poaching. It will be my decision to say, I want to move now. The solution to that is to ensure that we train.
Some are of the strong opinion that it’s time for the association to begin to take position on salient national issues. How favourably disposed are you to this suggestion?
Yes, we have to, if we want to be relevant. Taking position doesn’t mean we are against government. We can take position but we must be seen to mean anything more than what we are doing now. Yes, we can take position. It can be advisory. There is nothing wrong with a TV Station inviting members to come and do that.
What are your plans towards making the sector churn out award-winning works?
This is at two levels. First you as an agency, what drives you? What’s your ambition? Where do you want to be? There are people in the industry that will say I just want to make money. That’s legit. But the two can happen. You can make money and also make a living. And I think that’s what we should encourage ourselves to do. You will be surprised that some supposedly conservative clients will say I want to win at LAIF. We’ve heard that from some of our clients, and this speaks to the value people put into it. In fact the only reason we were invited to pitch Airtel back then was because of our consistent feats at the LAIF Awards. Those are the things that build the industry. It is the barometer of our creativity. So we need to encourage ourselves to do more in that regard and also peer review and others. We need to do more in encouraging crafts and conversation among ourselves.
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